If you didn’t know, St. Louis has one of the largest Mardi Gras celebrations in the U.S. One of the big kickoff events is the Beggin’ Strips Pet Parade, which attracts thousands of costumed dogs and revelers. I decided to try it out this year, especially when my co-worker said she’d be bringing her three pugs to the parade as well.

Of course, the year I decided to participate, we were expecting a “light dusting of snow” which turned out to be about 4-inches of accumulation. Undeterred, we bundled up ourselves and Pug and headed out.

I have tons of photos, so I’m going to break these posts up into two parts. I’ll start with the puggy goodness, and post the rest tomorrow. Most of the pictures were taken by my mom, since I had my hands full pug wrangling.

I don’t really own any Mardi Gras attire, so I made do with makeup and a feather mask.

I didn’t know if Pug would be able to handle walking the entire parade route, so I borrowed this puppy stroller my mom uses for her fosters. Despite practicing riding in it several times in the house, Pug promptly jumped out as soon as we were in public. Notice the fat lip he’s got? Yeah, he went face first onto the sidewalk.

Pug getting some love.

These pugs put Pug to shame with their stroller!

You might recognize these pugs. It’s Panda, Petunia and Luna from work. They have all made appearances on the blog before.